This promted some thought...
The document auto save feature, which is supported by Word, would be a very
useful feature, especially during dev work. I used that feature quite often
on my Win machine (which is now exclusively Linux) and miss it.
I purpose a option to automatically save to work to say,
~/.Abisource/word.autosave/... In order to do this effectively, is to perform
the task in a different thread. Does AbiSource's framework have a
pthread_create equivilent call? That is, a function that takes a function
pointer as a parameter, creates a new thread, then execute that function in
the background? I know windows and linux has a rough support for it, but is
there any functionality in the framework?
Another idea is to emulate the "fast save" feature. Since we keep all changes
stored in the undo buffer (hopefully), we should be able to just append the
changes to the abiword doc. It would not take too much additional code, just
in the saving and the importing bit.
Let me explain a little. On first save, the document is saved as normal.
Then, every 5 min, or so, all the changes to the document would be appended in
some sort of <abichanges>...</abichanges> section which would provide a sort
of diff approach, but not line by line but actual changes. If we have the
redo (reapplication of an undo) functionality implemented in abiword, we
should be able to load the orig document followed by all the abichanges, then
use the redo functionality to rechange/reapply everything. That is atleast
what Word does, from what I could gather.
So, if we have the undo/redo fully functional, fast save should not be too
hard to implement. And with threads, all of this could be done in the
background, (in addition to printing, importing, ...)
-shack